“Chas was her dad. The other guy was her fiancé. She was the ‘chick’ stuck holding the bag.” Altman’s voice was grim.
“And I just said… Aw, shit.”
“Whoa, Swimmer Girl. Just whoa some.”
Nikita didn’t want to whoa. She wanted to break her fist in some man’s face. She wanted to take down Marcus Curtis so hard that he’d never do more than crawl again.
She hadn’t even had the satisfaction of taking him down herself. He’d gotten drunk that night and decided to prove how tough he was. Apparently not as tough as the switchblade that slit his throat after he beat a whore halfway to death. That had been the end of Curtis Contracting as well.
Sugar finally rested a hand on her arm, “My legs aren’t as long as yours. At least slow down enough that I don’t have to run in this heat.”
“You’re the one who wears leather all the time.” But Nikita slowed her stride. Finally grinding to a halt somewhere a lot less nice than the Baymen’s Tavern. But the sign said “Tavern”, so she turned in.
It wasn’t like a ’Bama bar, all battered pickups and neon beer signs out front. Inside also wasn’t all battered tables and country boys nursing long-neck Budweisers.
The only thing lined up out front were poor people. The only thing inside were people with enough money to buy a beer and maybe a bowl of chicken escabeche soup. Shorts, short-sleeve shirts, and flip-flops were the dress code. She and Sugar must look like aliens from another planet.
The walls had once been white and the floor was still concrete. But the beer bottle handed across when she asked was just as beaded with sweat as the one in the peeling poster of a bikini-clad babe holding it between her breasts.
She dropped into a wooden chair at a table that rocked a good ten degrees when she set her bottle on it.
Sugar sat down across from her.
“Why do you wear leather?”
“You already know that.”
Nikita nodded. She did.
Sugar answered anyway. “Thought I was defining self-worth with the way I could draw those boys. Showing them I was just as tough as they were never seemed to make any difference. They just saw these,” she cupped her breasts, “so I gave them that. No one saw more, not until Jared. He taught me there was more to me than I knew.”
“But still you wear leather.”
“Jared is male. He likes it plenty, he just sees the woman behind the leather as well. Asides, it’s a part of who I am now. Not gonna be leaving that behind just because I fell in love with the man.”
Nikita sipped the cold beer, which soothed her parched throat.
“Just like you being all in love with Sweet Cheeks doesn’t change who you are. It makes you better.”
“It makes me get shot and doubt my sanity.”
Sugar smiled, “Yes on both accounts. Though I got shot when I was still in the ATF, back before Jared.”
“You were a field agent for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms?”
“A few of my low connections in high places. At least I was until Jared blew my cover trying to save one of his crew’s life. Still not sure if I’ve forgiven him for that. Now I’m mostly just a guncrafter.”
“You’re Lily Chase?” There couldn’t be that many top gunsmiths named Lily.
“Was. Took Jared’s name, mostly because we adopted Asal.”
Nikita wondered if you could ever really know anyone. One of the best gunsmiths working was a busty babe in the modern version of designer buckskin.
Sugar handed her another beer while Nikita looked at Miss Belikin Beer Bikini Girl in the poster again. She could have been the twin of the jitney boat tour guide. Maybe she was the same woman. Or maybe she was a banker making extra cash on the side.
Drake was like two different people. Or maybe more. The womanizer gunner. The angry man who wouldn’t let anyone help him clean up his fellow crew chief’s blood. The glorious male who had pounded into her against the shower wall yet whispered so gently that it was okay to not remember while he carried her in his arms.
“Can you ever really know someone?”
“Where would be the fun in that?”
She didn’t know. But she wished she couldn’t remember.
“You sure you don’t know what’s going on down there in Honduras? We land tomorrow—next port of call is Roatán. Anything would help.” Drake wasn’t sure when he’d switched from ice tea to beer. Altman had as well. Zoe and Asal had gone off to the hotel pool, leaving the three of them at the table with their beers.
“Why didn’t you just buy the damned picture?”
“It was tasteless, crass…”
“So was the bastard who ran GSI. It was a goddamn lead. Get the painting.”
“Why? You like nudes?”
“Yes, as long as her name is Lily Westin. You?”
Drake had to admit there was a nude he was very partial to himself. “But that stupid painting—I don’t like playing games.”
Jared crashed a fist down on the table. “Dammit! Listen, GI Joe. This whole goddamn thing is a game. You think that half the shit I did while I was on the inside made any sense? You think even that much makes sense on the outside? Do you have any idea how much they pay me for what I do? It sure shouldn’t be so much more than you make. What kind of sense is in that?”
It was one of the reasons that the people who served didn’t like the mercs, but only one of them. Few were like Jared and Titan. A lot more were like GSI and Curtis.
“How does it make sense that you guys are cleaning up GSI’s mess and not me,” Jared growled at his beer bottle as he worked at peeling off the label with a thumbnail.
“Are you still harping on that?”
Jared shrugged but didn’t look up.
“When Titan can launch people like SEAL Team 6 and the Night Stalkers 5E, you let me know.”
“Okay. Point taken. Can you at least explain to me why I never even heard about the 5E until I drove onto Fort Rucker a couple days ago?”
“Because,” Drake could see Altman eyeing him, but Drake wasn’t drunk. Well, not drunk enough to reveal state secrets. “Because like Nikita said, when we go through a door, no one knows we’ve been there.”
“What are you fighting so hard against, Swimmer Girl?”
“Don’t want to repeat the past.” Nikita considered another beer even though she hadn’t finished her current bottle. She considered getting blind drunk and missing the boat’s midnight departure.
“Doesn’t work that way,” Sugar pushed aside the empty plate of Belize Rice and Beans. That again changed the balance of their wobbly table and Sugar had to grab to rescue her beer.
“Sure it does.” For a crappy bar in a bad quarter, they served an amazing version of the traditional dish. It was rich from the coconut milk used instead of water. The heavy spices and the thick gravy from the stewed gibnut meat—whatever kind of local animal that was, Nikita didn’t want to know—soaked up some of the beer in her belly, but not too much.
“How is your past going to repeat?”
Almost everything. Maybe she could just stay in the present because the past and future were whacked-out worse than a plugged cesspool. She leaned back to stare up at the fan whispering overhead. It was close to sunset and the few bare bulbs above the bar did little to light the space. In this semi-twilight moment, it almost looked merely disreputable.
As she looked back down to answer Sugar’s question, a big man sat at their table and a hand clamped around Sugar’s wrist.
And it wasn’t J-dawg.
“You two will come with me,” his English was as thick as a swamp with Spanish.
“Fuck off!” Nikita had been about to say something important, but now couldn’t remember what it was. “Private conversation.”
With his hand that wasn’t pinning Sugar’s wrist, he did one of those flashy gang moves to flick out a switchblade instead of just opening it.
Nikita glanced at Sugar, who just grimaced. Amateur!
Th
e way Sugar’s eyes flickered up behind Nikita told her that she was wrong.
Amateurs! More than one.
Sugar jerked her arm toward her chest, dragging the man closer by his grasp on her wrist. Under the table, she planted one of her spike-heeled boots between his legs and hard into his crotch.
His scream hurt Nikita’s ears.
She felt hands come to rest on her shoulders from behind. With a hard shove off the floor, using all the leverage her SEAL-strong legs could give her, she flipped her chair over backward.
Her attacker stumbled away, knocked aside by the back of the chair.
When her back hit the floor, Nikita used her momentum to continue into a backward somersault. Halfway through she lashed out with her feet and caught the guy’s kneecap. There was a satisfying crunch up through the leather of her sandal as his knee broke and doubled over in the wrong direction.
Her continued roll knocked him onto his back with his leg doubled up under him. She rammed a punch into his sternum. Her aim was off but she was in a hurry. Instead of just knocking the wind out of him, she might have broken a couple of ribs as well.
A third attacker had Sugar by the hair, dragging her head back hard.
Somehow, Nikita still had her beer bottle in her other hand. She heaved it into the guy’s face hard enough to startle him into easing his grip on Sugar, maybe breaking his nose as a bonus.
It was all Sugar needed.
With a sweep kick, Sugar knocked his legs out from under him. As he fell forward, Sugar managed to get her hands behind the guy’s head.
Nikita kicked the table closer and Sugar rammed him down, chin-first onto it. By the look of the blood coming out of his mouth when Sugar let him fall to the floor, he was going to need a new jaw and some teeth to go with it.
They surveyed the scene.
The first attacker was still on the floor holding his crotch with one hand, but groping for his knife with the other.
Rather than kicking his knife aside, Sugar planted the pointed toe of her boot into his temple with a hard enough kick that he stopped having interest in anything other than bleeding. His cellphone lay close beside him and Sugar put a spiked heel through its heart with a satisfying crunch of glass and metal.
It had happened so fast that the other patrons hadn’t had a chance to do anything other than draw back and look aghast.
They looked at each other, then down at the table still standing between them.
Sugar laughed. “Table is stronger than it looks.”
Nikita nodded.
“The past isn’t,” Sugar’s suddenly fierce, dark-blue eyes were studying Nikita.
Maybe.
“Why don’t I like that sound?” Jared had Asal riding on his shoulders.
Drake didn’t like it either.
The women had been gone for hours, long enough that it had become an itch, so they’d all gone looking for them—Altman and Zoe starting to the north, Drake and Jared with Asal working from the south. The problem was that the trail had gone cold and there were five hundred cruise passengers reconvening on Belize City from their adventures, all in time for a pre-sailing dinner. Asking shopkeepers if they’d recently seen two pretty women in nice clothes didn’t work.
They’d rapidly worked their way out of the Tourist Village and into the rougher section of Belize City.
There were a lot of sounds that were strange in this city, but the whoop of a police siren was a very distinctive one.
Drake spotted it racing by two blocks over, closely followed by a wailing ambulance.
“Really don’t like that sound.” They broke into a jog, Asal clamping both hands around Jared’s forehead like a stoic captain weathering the tossing seas.
Around the corner and two more blocks up were a trio of flashing cop cars and a second ambulance.
Altman and Zoe came out of a side street and joined them as they reached the police perimeter.
“There,” Asal pointed from her perch atop Jared’s shoulders.
They forged forward as a unit, brushing aside the few policemen foolish enough to get in their way.
In the midst of it all, Sugar and Nikita were standing at ease, as if merely watching a parade go by. It might have worked as a ploy if not for the three cops hovering close beside them with their notepads out. They’d been at the center of whatever was going on.
Drake barged through, knocking a protesting sergeant and his notebook to the side.
“You okay, honey?”
“Honey?” Nikita looked at him in surprise. “When did I give you honey privileges?”
“Your apartment in Alabama? In a men’s shower maybe?” Drake was just glad to have found her. He’d missed her through the long slow afternoon—actually missed her. That was a strangeness he hadn’t noticed until this moment when he suddenly felt so happy to be standing next to her again.
“Maybe,” Nikita sounded as if she was in a much better mood than she’d been in days.
That’s when the gurneys started rolling out of the hole-in-the-wall tavern. Three big guys, looking awfully battered.
Drake glanced at Nikita and Sugar. Neither of them looked the least bit hurt, though they were making a point of straightening their clothes and finger-brushing back their hair.
When he met Jared’s gaze, the man’s smile was electric. Don’t you just love these women?
He did. Drake slipped a hand around Nikita’s waist and she let herself be pulled against him. He truly did.
Once the police let them go, they strolled together back toward the ship’s pier. Just three couples and a kid talking softly among themselves.
Other couples and groups were wending their way through the warm evening back to the ship, none close enough to hear quite how bizarre the conversation of their group might be.
Nikita had always liked that feeling of being special, being elite. It was her dad’s doing. Chas Hayward had taught her young about the high of being better than everyone around her. Better at martial arts, better at shooting, better at noticing details that no one else did. Curtis Contracting had fed that too, at least until it all came apart. Being a Team Six SEAL absolutely did that. But being in this little circle of specialists was something else. Here she wasn’t better than—she was part of. That was something else ST6 had taught her to understand, but this moment was somehow stronger and more powerful.
“I chatted with the bartender before the police arrived,” Sugar was explaining. “These guys were complete strangers. And a couple of the patrons said that their Spanish accent was wrong. Any Belizean would have more Creole or British influence.”
“Wish we could ID the bastards.” J-dawg’s growl said that whatever else he might be, he cared deeply about Sugar. Nikita could hear it in his voice.
Even mercenary bastards had feelings. Who knew. And now that she’d count Sugar as a friend, did that mean she had to accept J-dawg as well? That concept she didn’t like so much.
“I forgot to ask the damn cops how long it would take to get IDs.”
“Oh, we already know that without asking,” Nikita said in an offhand way.
Sugar’s smile said that Nikita was doing a fair job of channeling Sugar’s strong-woman attitude.
“It’s going to take them a long time. Those three didn’t seem like the chatty types.”
Their group had reached the head of the pier, where J-dawg and Sugar wouldn’t be able to follow past security.
While J-dawg and Drake cursed over the news, she turned aside to where the lights on the pier made a dark, shadowed area behind a wide palm. It was also out of sight of the pier’s security watch.
She and Sugar reached down their blouses and pulled out the three men’s wallets and passports.
“It may take them a very long time without these,” Nikita held them up.
The others’ laughter made it feel like she was taking a bow at the end of one of Drake’s stage performances.
“Careful with those,” Nikita stopped Jared from fli
pping one open. “We took fingerprints of each person on the inside flap.”
Jared peeled it open carefully, “What did you use for ink?”
“They each seemed to be leaving a lot of blood around. We also smeared a dollar bill on each of them so that there’d be plenty for a DNA sample.”
“IDs look fake as hell. Whatever port authority let these aboard should have his eyes examined.” Jared took all three wallets, “I’ll get these to Parker right away.”
“Hold it,” Altman reached out to stop him, but Jared fended him off.
“You people have a boat to catch. And don’t worry. Parker can get to any database he needs to.”
“That’s what worries me,” but Altman desisted.
“What worries me is this.” Nikita reached into the edge of her bra where the damn cards had been poking her.
She held out the men’s three cruise ship passes.
“And this,” she nodded to Sugar.
Sugar opened her leather vest and lifted her blouse enough to extract the long barrel of a silenced Ruger 22/45 LITE. It was a lean, nasty gun accurate out to seventy meters plus—well past the distance from observation deck to bow. The shooter had put those two shots exactly where he’d intended.
“Scare tactics with the gun. Then a kidnapping attempt. Someone is trying to spook your team,” Sugar concluded.
Nikita took it from her. They hadn’t had time to inspect it carefully before. She dropped the magazine and held it up to the light.
“Full,” Drake said looking over her shoulder.
“So no way to tell if this was the weapon that shot at us, but the model and silencer make it likely.”
“Please tell me you hurt the man bad.”
“Well, I can tell you one thing, Sweet Cheeks,” Nikita leaned in and kissed Drake on the nose. “After what Sugar did to him, he may never have sex again.”
Chapter Eleven
They waited until the ship was dark and quiet before they went on the hunt. They were two hours out to sea and the ship was rolling a bit in the heavy side sea, but not enough to make them misstep.
Target of Mine: The Night Stalkers 5E (Titan World Book 2) Page 13